Departmental Seminar

Superfluids of light

Professor David W Snoke

University of Pittsburgh, USA

Friday 16 February 2018 2–3pm

It is possible to engineer the properties of photons in an optical medium to have an effective mass and repulsive interactions, so that they act like a gas of atoms. These "renormalized photons" are called polaritons. In the past ten years, several experiments have demonstrated many of the canonical effects of Bose-Einstein condensation and superfluidity of polaritons. In this talk I will review some of this past work and present recent results, including oscillation of a polariton condensate in a one-dimensional ring trap.